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My garden used to be full of these coneflowers. The were always the first to come up in the spring and their bright purple colour made me very happy. I love it when there’s something so unbelievable in nature–a colour that bold–how can it exist?

The space outside our house, well, I’ve tried to tame it. It’s got flowers that I planted from seeds, it’s got many different kinds of lavender, it’s got all kinds of native plants, and then the leftovers from when it was landscaped for about six months before my garden simply said: nope, we far prefer to be this way, wild as wild can be.

But my coneflowers have disappeared. This is the last of them, and it’s weak and barely hanging on, finally giving up the ghost to the many many brown-eyed Susans that propagate like, well, plants. And oh, the metaphors. I’m getting there. My mind this week has been wild, too, vacillating between trying to prune negative thoughts, and the kind of emptiness you get from days without sleeping. Hollowed out, a bit. Exasperated.

We are going up north tomorrow to begin to clean out my grandmother’s cottage. We’re going to rebuild, on the exact same footprint as the building that’s there now, grandfathering, it’s called. (So the permits and stuff haven’t been as complex as if we were building a cottage from scratch). The new building should be up this year, and then we’ll finish it this year. Like anything, I’m pruning memories, gearing up for the well of emotions when the old building comes down and we replace it with something else that’ll last for generations in my family like this one has. Don’t get me wrong, the building isn’t anything special–as a friend of my brother’s joked, “it rains in the cottage before it rains outside.” Last summer we went up for a bit of pandemic break when we were allowed to travel, and the whole place was filled with mites. The outhouse is seventy years old. Honestly, it’s time for it to go–but it’s created friction between my brother and I, as he doesn’t want us to tear it down (he has a separate place on the property), like I’m taking something away instead of looking at it like we’re building something that’s going to last.

Like my coneflowers, as the gardens of our life expand and contract, certain plants come and go, and the building is after all, just a building. But it’s hard when emotions keep winning over. It’s been a hard week for me. Work reviews and disappointment and never-ending Covid (I get my shot on Monday) and really late nights trying to get everything finished, and feeling very upset at myself–like wishing I could prune the wild out of me that sometimes doesn’t quite fit in with the world. Get deep down in the mess of that feeling of failure, and it hurts–it does, like I’ve failed to save my poor coneflowers.

All my tricks aren’t working and I’ve resulted to sleeping meds, just to get a break from the relentless chaos in my mind. Which is a bad cycle anyway. I can feel the disease grumbling but the doctors think I’m imagining it–maybe I am–but . . . maybe not. So now I’m going to sleep in a medicated haze for a week, stop taking the meds, be awake for about 48-hours and hopefully things in my mind will have levelled out by then. Or maybe not–I just keep thinking if I can get to next week, maybe the chaos will level out.

The news, can’t without crying.

Reading: Laura Lippman’s latest.

Watching: Exceptionally terrible but deliciously good Discovery of Witches.

Tomorrow I will be near a lake, and looking at scenery that’s different from the view out of my front window. What?

Friday. How did that happen?

Behind, behind, behind, that’s the pitter-patter that’s been in my brain all week–I’m so very behind. Behind in getting our taxes organized (they were still filed on time thank you to a wonderful family friend who does them for us). Behind in work. Behind in my ongoing list of to-dos. Behind in getting out of my head and getting outside. As I said on Instagram this week: “My heart just isn’t in it.” That’s a line I stole from a Neko Case song called “In California” that has been in my head all week and I’m even behind in getting it out of my head.

But today it’s raining, I’ve worked my work week (I do M-Thurs, 8AM-6PM and keep Fridays quiet so I can attempt to not be behind), and I’m sitting quietly in my office listening to the album, finally. Oh, and I’m writing my weekly blog post. So, where’s my head at this week? What do I need to process? Where am I wandering in my mind. Behind, behind, behind.

More than any other season, the summer is a memory-builder for me. It’s the season of adventures. It’s the season where I’ve done most of my traveling, and it’s the season where, like many other people, I recharge–soak up enough sunshine to get me through a Canadian winter. But it also means that my mind cycles through regrets as often as it reminds me that I have been to Paris four or five times.

Trying to capture that sense of a season in prose is hard. Those feelings, the freedom, the fact that I once drove halfway across the country to spend not one but two summers in Banff, Alberta in university without a phone or a credit card or really any kind of safety net–that’s what I want to bottle in some way and show it to my son one day. Look, your mom did these things, she did them even though she had a disease, even though she had no family out there, even though it would have been safer to stay in Ontario. We hopped in a car with one of our roommates and we drove from here to there, found jobs, found places to live, built a community, and lived wild for four months before going back to university in September.

I did all of this with my friend Hannah. We met in first year, we were in the same dorm at Queen’s. We both were taking arts courses, and we came from similar backgrounds (read, we didn’t go to private school). We became fast friends. And I used to tell people that Hannah was the person who was most like me in the world–and that I was lucky to find her at school. It wasn’t the happiest time for me. The trail of sadness after losing my mom before starting high school, getting sick with the disease, and a number of other compounding losses meant I was deeply messed up those years. I made some really poor decisions. Most of them involving boys. But I used to think it was all worth it because I had Hannah. We stayed together for all of university, the kind of BFFs you have in your early adulthood, when you find your second family. Your chosen family. And you think, yes, this is it, I can finally be myself.

And we stayed friends for a long time after university, too. She lived (or still does, I don’t actually know) across the country in Vancouver, and I’d go see her once a year, once every other year, often planning other adventures around seeing Hannah and spending time together, and when she’d come back to Ontario to see her family, she would do the same. I remember one year when I turned thirty my now-husband and I flew to Vancouver, spent time with Hannah and her fellow, and then drove all the way down to California. It was a fantastic trip, even when my now-husband told me (on the eve of my birthday no less) that he never wanted to get married or have kids. Ha! Funny how these things turn out as we’ve now been together for twenty-three years and our kid is turning eleven in October. But my point is that things change. People change. But you never notice how you, yourself changes–and when you’re as stubborn and intensely anti-reflective as I am–it seems that you never do.

Except, I must have. And she must have to–because, I’m sure you can tell from the title of this post, that we are no longer friends. I don’t even really know what happened, but when my son was about ten months old, Hannah had come back to Ontario to see her family. I was talking to her on the phone from our cottage, excited to drive somewhere to see her, even if it was halfway between her place and ours–I wanted her to meet my son. I wanted her to see him. And I wanted to give her a hug–as it’d had been one of the most difficult years health-wise I’d ever had–truly, and without a word of hyperbole–I was lucky to be alive.

The phone call hangs in my memory like a picture on a wall. When I can I see you? I ask. Hannah hums and haws. I’ll drive anywhere, I say, I’ve got the car, I can come to you. No, she says, she’s got to help her family with a yard sale. And I’m upset at this point–crying, big dopey tears–I’m heavily medicated, I’ve got a newborn, I’d learned I’d broken my pelvis and my blood pressure was in the toilet from all the meds so I was living through mud, my husband was back in the city working, and I was surrounded by my family who helped with the baby all the time, but I was exhausted. And she said, I don’t think it’ll work out, this time. But you won’t meet the baby? I said. You’re breaking my heart. Those my exact words: You’re breaking my heart. Don’t say that. She replied. Don’t say that. And then we hung up–we must have said goodbye but I don’t remember–but I do know this was the last conversation we ever had.

And to this day I don’t know why. I don’t know what that triggered for her to stop talking to me and I just knew that I couldn’t be the one to call first and all these years later (my kid will be eleven this fall) I still regret not getting over myself and just calling her the next week to say I’m sorry or what happened or why did that upset you so much that you simply ghosted me.

Because it’s hard when you’re already in so much pain and in such a tough place to see how that tough place might impact those around you. And all of this is to say that for those friends that I’ve lost in my life, today I am feeling the regret. I’ve got a big birthday coming up in July (I’m not going to name the numbers, it’s awful, LOL) but I will say that these past few weeks I’ve been really contemplating the loss of friendship and how it impacts your life.

I love my husband. I love my son. I love my other BFFs, and my beloved ride-or-dies from high school who knew me before Queen’s and still loved me after I got home, which I think might have been tough, as I was probably more than a little bit of an asshole. And I’ve got other wonderful friends that I’ve met in the years since, mom friends, neighbours, our close-knit crew that make up our found family, my husband and I–and I have some absolutely amazing girlfriends that I talk to all the time, that I make a point to see, that I love to be in their company because they’re truly amazing humans that make my life better every single day. But a part of me still misses my friend Hannah who one day stopped talking to me and never resurfaced again. Because that’s what loss is–it’s that people make an indelible imprint on your life and when they’re not there any more those feelings don’t have anywhere to go, and there’s just a bit of a hole. It might be a pinprick, it might be a black hole, but it’s a hole nonetheless. And sometimes it aches like a phantom limb when you’re behind, behind, behind in just about everything.

I could go one and tell you about another relationship that fell apart a few years ago that I still miss too, but I’ve obviously talked too much as it is. I could tell you about the time I blew up my old book club with my big mouth (sense a trend?). These are my three main regrets in life–losing Hannah, blowing up my old book club, and the loss of another friendship that’s still too raw to really process, and it’s been almost three years for that one.

Oh, the song’s on now–“said you were happy for me, but your heart wasn’t in it,” the line goes. “Just a phone call away, now there’s nothing to say, as the days roll by disconnected.”

And that’s sort of where I am today. Pondering regrets and wishing I could make apologies, fill up those holes with some sunflowers, maybe a little earth, pat the garden down, give a place for the bees to congregate and tell the people that I let down that I do still love them.

Watching my son balance against the wall (even though this picture is a few months old now) feels like an apt visual metaphor for the past week. The hours are long but the days are short, and even through the tedium of working from home, now, again, for the foreseeable future. When I find it hard to concentrate, I think of my boisterous boy here–balancing with all his might, trying to perfect something he’s never been thoroughly taught. He’s the epitome of an autodidact–when it comes to gymnastics. From cartwheels to front flips and roundoffs and somersaults, you would think that we weren’t following the naturalized parenting advice to “go where your children lead you.” But we did. We sent him to a few gymnastic camps to which he promptly said, “nope, too many girls. More hockey.”

The other night at the dinner table, we’d been having a harder conversation. There have been a lot of issues with the rules lately, and managing screen time, school being from a computer vs a classroom, and me working so much, means that when we do attempt to claw back some of the screen time, his world explodes. And when his father said something akin to the fact that you have to talk about your feelings with your family because where else are you going to do it, “I mean, not your friends, obviously.” To which my son immediately became a teenager, scoffed, and said, “Pffft, no.” Meaning he never talks to his friends about his feelings but essentially about Minecraft, and whatever else is happening on YouTube. I mean, I don’t get it, because I talk to my friends about my feelings all the time, in fact, I wonder, often if they don’t get sick of hearing about it.

Raising boys is not for the feint of heart. “Oh, mom’s crying again.” My son will often tease if we’re watching something that causes my waterworks (it doesn’t take much, truth be told, ever since I’ve become a mom, I cry A LOT). And I can’t never tell if it’s because he’s feeling empathetic or mocking me. That’s a hard one.

With their inherent contradictions, 10-year olds are a fascinating bunch. They want independence but can’t keep track of anything. He leaves a path of destruction throughout the house that is shocking sometimes (and I say this as someone who has learned for cough-cough so many years that I also have a Pig Pen-esque way of leaving piles of crap wherever I go) and still wants to be cuddled like he was when a toddler in bed at night. His feet have reached that floppy puppy phase where they’re huge and he hasn’t quite caught up to them yet, and we are missing, desperately, the structure of organized sports. It’s a balancing act, for him right now, hovering between being a small child and being a tween, and the transformation is something. He says “brah” without the least bit of irony but will be the first to point out that something is sexist. He is a fierce defender of animals and refuses to let his friends litter. He laughs uproariously at the word “junk” and what it refers to but still wants me to read Charlotte’s Web to him at night. Man, it’s been a blessing being home and seeing these changes–a gift of pandemic life–but I might give my left arm for us all to be back in school in September. Having never been a 10YO boy, sometimes I forget that he hasn’t been either, and all of the things he’s going through are absolutely new to him, too. Ah, parenting.

In other news. I’ve been rewriting a coming of age novel that I started a few years ago called Burlington that I actually really like. I workshopped some of it in the Harvard course I took over the winter, and feel like I have a solid way forward. My goal (putting it out there) is to have a solid, queryable draft by the end of the summer. It’ll be a reach with all of my “real” work to do + teaching + a course rewrite I’ve also been contracted to do with Ryerson. Living in the overwhelm has just become such a part of everyday life that I don’t even notice it anymore. Like if I don’t have 47 tabs open on my computer my brain shorts out, not knowing what to do next (like, relax? To echo my son, pffft).

The weather’s so nice that we’re out biking again (glorious). I’ve been slowly reading A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet who is a writer I just discovered this year and one where I can hardly believe I’ve never read before. We watched Shadow and Bone as a family and have now moved onto Sweet Tooth, which I adore in all its Lemony-Snicket-goodness. And I’ve been editing some really amazing romance writers through work–which scratches that emotional itch that only Harlequin-type books can. But a post about that later . . .

All in all it’s been a good week. How are you?

As the world prepared to enter into its second winter of lockdown, I knew that I couldn’t continue in the same vein for another year. We’ve coped well, I think, our family unit, from finding an equilibrium between both work and school being at home, to following all of the never-ending guidelines by the provincial government and cocooning in our house, again, in a vicious never-ending circle. This isn’t news. This isn’t even interesting. Collectively, perhaps what’s lost this time around in Covid summer is that “we’re all in it together vibe.” These days I feel like we’re all that annoying childhood moment of being in the backseat of a long car journey whining: “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? How about now? Are we there yet?”

And we are not there yet.

We are still daydreaming of the destination, of where that car might take us–whether that’s to see beloved cousins or explore a city we’d never been to before. The above is a picture of my foot on some literal crossroads. Taken at the top of the West Toronto Railpath, one of my favourite parts of my neighbourhood, I plop my metaphorical foot down each time I get to the top of the trail and make a decision to go left or right or to turn around and go back the way I started. Except the view isn’t ever the same, even if you take the same route home. There are different people to see, different trees to see, and the birds, the birds, the birds.

And yet, there are days when it’s just not enough. The lists, the planning, the constant hum of forced motivation when we’re all stuck in such bad patterns. Way too much screen time. Way too much separate-togetherness. We have huge things happening this year–from work to life and more, those crossroads, again, that we all come to. Big birthdays. Next year my son finished elementary school. We are building a new cottage where my grandparents’ cabin has stood for 70+ years (it’s falling down). We’re finally finishing the backyard. All of these things have been planned for years, and still–that feeling of sitting on the precipice persists. It’s all going to go wrong. We won’t find the rest of the capital we need. My son will ultimately stop succeeding academically. I know these are not rational or even normal thoughts but there seems to be little escape from the pockets of panic that creep into the corners of my mind. And that’s not even to mention the hum of the pandemic that has changed so much of our daily lives.

I had made some New Year’s Revolutions in January. Go outside every day (This one I’ve kept). Practise French and Swedish (I’ve missed two days now in the last six months; not bad). Take a course that’s just for me (Harvard Extension School; it was called Proseminar: Elements of the Writers Craft, and I spent weeks writing an essay on Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” and it was glorious). Try to find balance between work and home (have not remotely accomplished this). File our taxes on time (Pending). Read (I do this all day every day, I count work reading). Walk (See above; going outside). Write (I wish I could do more). And so on. Without the structure of these kinds of lists, I fall far into my own head. I fall deep into the abyss of worrying about the disease, about our mental health in this whole experience, of what kind of life we’ll have, of what’s happening to the Earth, of hoping my friends and family stay safe, of missing people and not seeing them, of being relatively bad at keeping in touch . . . and then, and then. And then.

So, I’m beginning again. I’m adding to the list. And some might suggest with everything that’s going on, more isn’t the answer. But if I start here once a week, and say it out loud. That it’s not that bad. That we’ve done a good job surviving so far. That I love to put virtual pen to paper. That I can carve out a bit of space here for just barfing out my feelings, we can make it through the next few months.

It’s not so much blogging as it is maybe journaling. Trying to work out personal essay writing in small chunks so I can practice some narrative nonfiction. I can go left, right, or back the way I came, and each time the sentences will look a little different, which is exactly the point.

While I was in graduate school, in a pitch of desperation during a flare-up of my Wegener’s, I made a list of accomplishments–not current, but what I wanted out of life. Most of them were typical for someone of my age and state-of-life, I wanted to have kids, and find a better job, and go to Paris, and England–and foolishly, write a book.

At the time, I was barely surviving grad school. I mean, I ended up with a degree by the skin of my teeth, and was then set adrift because my plan of becoming a professor sort of relied upon going forward and doing a doctorate. Further school was not for me, I wasn’t cut out for the competitiveness, nor the cutthroat nature of grad school, but I did enjoy writing. But my work at the time was a mess, I mean, there’s stream of consciousness and then there’s just words on the page, which is what my writing tended towards.

Over the years, I’ve gone back to thinking about that list, because it’s in my nature to simply cross items off and keep moving forward onto the next line that will ultimately bring fulfillment. Except that’s not quite how life works. Goals are hard to achieve, and sometimes they take far longer than you’d ever expect. So, way in the way back I had “write a novel” on that list, and it wasn’t until this passed December that I finally crossed it, metaphorically, off.

Still, I want to distill what I was actually trying to observe–writing a novel is one part of it, following the journey of a character from start to finish in a way that’s readable, entertaining, and engaging is a very rewarding goal. But I think what I was trying to escape at the time from the misery of my one-bedroom underground apartment was my quest for a career. So, it’s never been about just “novels”–it’s more about making a living from my pen. At the time, I was reading a lot of Aphra Behn, and was besotted by the idea of earning my keep from writing. And in the following years, I’ve managed to make a dent in this goal, whether it was abridging classics for kids, being a complete hack on the internet, and publishing the odd poem or two about Johnny Cash. I’m not an artist, and I wouldn’t even call myself an author if anyone asked. I never thought I would make a very good freelancer or magazine writer, although I’ve never pursued either of those options, primarily because I’ve been extraordinarily lucky to fall into a career in publishing over the last decade. I just really like writing. I like characters and pulling out sadness and pushing bad situations to worse and examining the human condition and poor decisions and so on.

I managed, over the course of about three years, to write a solid draft of a very Canadian novel. It was highly flawed and utterly unpublishable. I can see that now, but what it did give me was the courage to keep going. It gave me the idea that I could get to the end of something if I focussed on the process that works for me (I was doing a page a day, rain or shine) and held onto the time. The biggest hurdle was finding the right voice. I’m a natural echo. I am deeply influenced by the written word, by music, and by movies. And so the first book I wrote was super literary, really intense, and completely unbelievable; if you can believe it, I was reading, watching, and listening to super-heavy, intensely artistic, and amazingly gifted art-art at the time. A friend of a friend at work kindly referred me to an agent, who read the book and even more kindly rejected it, and by then I was at the end of my pregnancy, which meant that we were at the beginning of the terrifying journey to bring my son into the world. So, novels were once again put on the back burner.

Fast-forward a couple of years. And I’ve found my confidence again, found the right voice, the right tone, and am plugging away again at something different this time–it’s old-school chicklit, like you’d have read at the beginning of this decade. Think Gemma Townley or Jane Green only edgier because I’m incapable of writing characters who aren’t, at their core, completely messed up for one reason or another. The book is there, and I can see it, the beginning, middle, and end, and I find that if I write the ending, always an afterword of a sorts, I can get TO the end. THE WORK BOYFRIEND had a cute concept, a good conflict, and a resolution at the end that I thought was satisfying.

Starting a business, of any kind, is a challenging endeavour. Even though I’ve been in publishing for a decade now, I knew it would be a challenge to put the book out myself. I’m extraordinarily lucky that I have a business partner with whom I am keenly matched, and I also understand the necessity of certain parts of the process, like copy editing and building a fully functioning epub. In that sense, I’m luckier than a lot of writers who come into this space. Still, the challenges are legion. Just because we work in publishing doesn’t mean that the publishing world will do us any favours. Publishing is, above all, a business. Just because I might have met the editor Globe Books through work at some point, doesn’t change the fact that they don’t review self-published books. And we’re a small two-person company without marketing budgets and have no interest in publishing a physical book. The whole model was something I wanted to try, simply because I’m interested in the differences between how my business does its business vs. how the business could be done outside the business.

So, the book is up–and friends and family have been kind and generous with both their time and their social media space. We have a great cover, and some amazing early reads, with some solid reviews up on Amazon. Now the real work begins. We made the decision not to put the book up exclusively on Amazon, which means our royalty percentage is lower. Kobo’s a big part of the Canadian ebook market, so we spoke to some kind, generous people at Writing Life. And female-driven, romantic-type stories do well on both Apple and Google, from what I’ve seen on their bestseller lists. So we’ve got the positioning down pat. But none of this guarantees the book will be merchandised, and I completely understand that–primarily because, like I said above, the ecosystem of publishing revolves around the fact that it’s a business, and there’s limited space for self-published authors, independents like us, on the homepages of sites like iBooks or Kobo. And the number one way of finding ebook readers, of discovery, is via merchandising.

With merchandising out of the picture, we’ve got to start building up word of mouth and momentum–which isn’t easy. It’s the hard work of find readers, of supplying reading copies, and of asking for favours, which I’ve never really felt comfortable doing. Social media will only take you so far, and a like does not equal a sale. I have wonderful friends and an incredibly supportive family, but they aren’t all ebook readers, and it’s not the same as your aunt heading into the bookstore and buying ten copies of your book because she’s so proud of you… So, it’s interesting. There’s the added issue that there are millions of ebooks on the market, and breaking through is hard–the formula, publish lots, offer your readership something for free, and slowly build an audience is what we’re working towards, but that’s more relevant for romance or, ahem, heavy romance, then the single novel-type novel that I’ve written.

So, the experiment continues. I’m over the panic and worry for the moment, the money that’s out there will trickle back with every copy we’ve sold. Right now we’re sitting at over 50+ copies, which isn’t terrible, but it’s not great either. We’ve made about $100.00, which I am incredibly grateful for, and the most profitable copy of the book I sold was emailing the ebook to a friend who bought it directly from me. And I think my experience is very different from what Jowita Bydlowska talked about in the National Post, primarily because the kind of books we’re writing are different, but the struggles are the same–to find an audience, to build up a readership, to make it on your own–it’s akin to the scrappy DIY-nature of most of my life. And I’m staying true to my list, to the distilled goal anyway, of making a living by my pen–even if right now it’s coming in painfully slow drips and drops of $10.00 payments from Amazon.

We’re getting there. I’m now realizing that perhaps I was premature in crossing “write a novel” off my list, because while I might not be an author in the traditional sense, I did find the essence of myself in that list. “Write a novel” wasn’t the end, it was really just the beginning.

As a publishing professional, I’m curious about the changes in our industry, about the opportunities, and about platform. So, here’s our grand experiment. Written over the last couple years in the half-hour I had a few times a week, it’s a chicklit novel (with a bit of an edge) about a young woman trusting her instincts and carving out her life, on her own terms. Because I’m an ebook person, and because I have Rebecca Mills, my amazing partner-in-crime when it comes to this endeavour, we are trying out digital-only publishing.

So, The Work Boyfriend is in the world. It’s up here at Amazon, through Kindle Direct Publishing, and here at Kobo through their amazing Writing Life platform, here at Google, and here at iTunes.

Like I said, we’re curious to see how it all works. But, overall, I just wanted to prove to myself that I could finish something–and I hope for those who kindly decide to read it, that they enjoy it.

I have a million and a half people to thank, the aforementioned Rebecca, without whom the book would simply not be up at any of the vendors; my family, who loves me but, more importantly, puts up with me; especially my sister-in-law Denise and her friend Charlene, who read early drafts and were encouraging. Jessica Albert, who did our super-cute cover. My friends, who said go-go-go from the beginning, with a special shout-out to Nadine Silverthorne, without whom there would, literally, be no book. And work for giving me the okay.

Anyhow. I’m excited. And terrified. But thrilled to be continuing the indie spirit of our family, from my rock ‘n’ roll husband, who has played independent music for over two decades now. So, we’ll see how it all goes… publishing a book kind of like you would a blog–I like it, I think?

And P.S. The name of our company, Farringdon Road, comes from my British great-great-grandfather, who was a publisher in London–it was his place of business, sort of (we changed the “Street” to “Road” because we liked it better).

Funny, I didn’t even know this photo existed until this past summer, when my aunt showed it to me. There’s my grandmother, in the top-right corner, standing beside her mother, and beside my great-uncle, who was a member of the Canadian Navy (I think). The caption on the back says that it’s D-Day, June 1944–and I am nowhere, not remotely alive, but that’s okay.

That my grandmother had a life, an entire world away, before she came to Canada as a war bride and become, as I knew her, my Nanny, intrigues me. It’s a research project, to find out more, more, more about my grandmother’s life. I remember more of her, because she was alive, with me, for longer than my mother, but she’s no less enigmatic, because so many questions I have remain unanswered. Her’s was a hard life, one of supporting tragedy, of having lived through the bombs, and the Blitz, and of ushering in new life (my aunt!) in the wake of all that blew up, oh, those Boomers. What was to come? Losing herself to colon cancer, that runs in our family, her son to follow a decade later, losing her middle child to the accident, like we all did, widowhood, and raising her grandchildren as much as was necessary–and that’s the part that I feel like I can tackle now.

I did not know her in this photo, but I want to. I want to ask her what it was like to be in London during the war. What it must have been to go to work at fourteen, when she really wanted to stay in school. What it was to meet my grandfather, and to see your life in that first blush of romance, to spend all that time with someone that maybe you shouldn’t have been with, to be an only child, to be British, and then staunchly Canadian. To be private, to have lived a life inside yourself, and so responsible, even if life gets beyond you. These are all my questions. These are all moments that I wish I could go back and ask about.

My favourite memory of my grandmother, and there are so many, are of her playing invisible snap with some friends of mine from high school. Of her holding court over a crazy pile of teenagers in the backyard of our house on Chaumont Cresent, where we lived in Mississauga. The first time I had a drink (peach schnapps, I do not recommend it). The first of many times my house was invaded by piles of teenagers and, still, my grandmother had a spirit and a presence about all of it–letting me find my way, enjoying my friends, enjoying herself. Another moment in time: my head in her lap as she ran through family history with me, noting cousins, aunts, uncles. I still have the piece of paper where we mapped it all out. Since then, I’ve gone through a half-dozen more generations, tracing as far back as I can to somehow reach deep down and figure out who I am. I’m not there yet.

In that moment, right before she died, wearing an oxygen mask, and settled in her bed, I wanted to shout out a list of everything she saved me from when she stepped in during the first tumultuous years after my mother’s accident. She saved me, most of all, from myself. She gave me her spirit of adventure, and her tenacity. She cut my hair, and loved me fiercely, but quietly. She was firm, but strong, and had character that came from someplace I would never understand. She made my clothes, and tried to teach me how to knit, backwards, because I’m left-handed, and left behind a space that aches when it’s sunny, in particular, at the cottage, a place she loved.

No special anniversary to celebrate. No giant, sweeping epic. A few secrets, I’m sure. It’s again, more of the everyday that I miss. And that’s the rub, that’s the intensity of losing so many people that you love. You can’t appreciate the small moments, in detail, because they’re forgettable. And that’s the way it should be. You can’t climb back through time, because it’s impossible. You can’t remember everything. But there are moments when I wish I could slip into the photograph, and stand beside my grandmother, wear my own pinny, wave a flag, and shout out: “I was here. You were here. And I love you, desperately.”

Picture the moment before a pandemic–what might that look like–people in everyday situations going about their everyday lives. Some are at the theatre. Some are walking home from work. Some are on a plane going somewhere. Coming home from somewhere. Stuck somewhere. This is the premise that opens Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel’s captivating novel. In the instant before the world collapses, one man falls down on stage–a renown and infamous actor, Arthur Leander–dead from an apparent heart attack. A young man, training to be a paramedic, hops up on stage to try and save him. He can’t. A young girl in the production of King Lear with him is deeply, profoundly affected by not only his death, but her association with the play itself. An ex-wife a world away who hears the news, doesn’t quite know what to do with it. And what Mandel has done here, sits with me, profoundly–because she has paused on the very moments before a calamity, and allowed her characters to stew in an everyday tragedy. Here’s the mark, the one event that would have scarred your life had it gone on as it should; instead, it becomes the punctuation, an ellipsis, that melts into a much larger event–the end of the world, essentially. And that to me is some smart, smart storytelling.

The Georgian Flu, an extreme case of a type of avian flu, hits the world and within a few weeks 90% (or some crazy number, no one really knows exactly how many) of the world’s population is dead. And with any pandemic, the life that’s left behind is forever “after,” so much so that the years are recalibrated as “Year One,” “Year Two,” etc., after the worst has passed.

Many of the characters in Station Eleven are artists, the members of the Traveling Symphony that roam a mostly safe route to perform, as a troupe would have in the days theatre first evolved, from place to place, looking for an audience. They are storytellers, hunter-gatherers of culture, roaming their way across a civilization that has lost everything. For me, while the threat of other people was always ever-present, it never really approached Walking Dead territory, where every human being puts up a kill or be killed kind of fight. This isn’t a post-apocalyptic situation that I’m used to–there’s Shakespeare in this world. There’s Bach and a museum, and a thread of the “before” in ways that feel as if Mandel means to point out that art is important. That said, the world isn’t without its dangers, and when members of their troupe go missing after engaging with a particularly fanatical prophet, it becomes apparent that the skills of the road, the necessary parts of survival, are as bare and animalistic as one would imagine.

So there are survivors, and there are victims. There is magic and there is brutality. There is humanity and there is insanity in this new world post-flu. And overall, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book–I loved Arthur’s flawed character, and how, even in death, his presence haunts the entire book. I really liked the Traveling Symphony and their wandering band of actors and musicians. I even, truly, appreciated the ending of the novel, which I won’t spoil here for obvious reasons.

Still, I’ve been ruined by post-apocalyptic situations. Mainly, I’ve been ruined by Battlestar Galactica. I know. That might be the strangest sentence I’ve ever written in a book review before. But stay with me–here’s what I think. The nature of the attack on humanity was different, alien, in fact, and the humans were stranded on a small fleet of vehicles up in space–but they managed to keep civilization somewhat in tact because there was government. And that’s, I know, not Mandel’s point–she’s more focused on individuals, and not what a country would do, but that’s where the book fell down for me, ever-so slightly. That in all the years, and all of the small civilizations that would have sprung up, there would have been some effort to at least locate survivors of government, to keep something at least barely organized, in communication–and that the whole world essentially stops around a band of what feels like to me, the least likely to survive, felt a bit contrived.

I’m probably not expressing myself clearly–so I’ll stop there. It’s a good book. Highly deserving of all its praise and accolades, and one I am so pleased I read this year, when reading has been more of a challenge for me than any other time in my life.

The last few months of my reading life have been bereft of a key ingredient: actual reading. I was having a hard time finding books, reading them, and finishing them. Not sure if I’ve found my way. Books have been the one constant in my life and, yet, I have so little time for reading. Caroline Adderson’s wonderful Ellen in Pieces put a spring in my step, and not just because it’s the first book in a long time that I’ve read cover-to-cover in a super-short period of time. It’s the perfect kind of book for a weekend afternoon of reading when your kid is ensconced in watching some Disney movie you’ve already listened to a million times. You will fall into this book and feel at various moments that, for a woman of a certain age, living a certain life, with or without children, Adderson has seen right into your life.

Forgive me for allowing that the “pieces” of the title refer to the book’s non-linear format. It slips back and forth through time and up and down different points of view. It’s disconcerting at moments, not because the book doesn’t make sense or the parts beyond the novel’s central character, Ellen, are lacking, but simply because I loved that character so much I resented those other voices, the other perspectives. But no one lives their life in a vacuum, and when you hear about Ellen from her best friends, from her cad of an ex-husband, from her young lover, from her children, it adds layers upon layers to a life already rich with mistakes, misgivings, happiness, and wild abandon.

And I’m taking lessons from reading The Empathy Exams, which is another book that I managed to actually finish these days–polar opposite to a book of fiction written in Canada–but there’s a central thesis in one of Jamison’s essays that touches upon the state of “female pain.” It’s a very worthwhile essay to contemplate, for many reasons, not the least of which is an insistence, ever so slight, that despite the tropes around the idea of women in pain, these kinds of stories exist, they are our stories, and we should claim them. I am paraphrasing, badly, but I was thinking about this, desperately, over the last couple weeks, and found that pain resonates throughout Ellen in Pieces, whether it’s the pain of your own broken dreams, of broken relationships, of failed friendships, of mother-daughter bonds–really, simply, of life itself.

Novels about women who have breast cancer are a dime a dozen. I can think of a few off the top of my head that made me want to punch a wall for how obviously they were manipulating both the idea of loss and the illness itself. I can think of one other book that I’ve read in recent memory where illness wasn’t a device but a wonderful, necessary part of the story (Lionel Shriver’s So Much For That). Let’s put the SPOILER tag in here now… Here, Ellen’s breast cancer doesn’t feel manipulative. It’s not maudlin, and it’s not melodramatic. But what’s also interesting is that is the moment that Adderson skips Ellen’s point of view and begins to tell the story from the perspective of the other characters. I missed Ellen through the second half of the book. I missed her raw, angry, and sometimes unforgiving voice. I also missed her energy, her motion, and her voice. She’s a great character, and I wished, in a way, that Adderson had at least continued to show us her own thoughts during her illness. But then maybe I’d be missing the point. Because what her death allowed was the rejuvenation of so many people in her life, her eldest daughter in particular; and it stopped the book from turning me completely into a puddle. There are many voices in this book, each crowding to the surface to show ordinary life at its most extraordinary. Still, the true heralding success of this novel, for me anyway, has to be the author’s voice–it’s rich, symphonic even, and had me from the first page. It’s a rare feat these days, finding a book that can cut through my exhaustion, my own trials and tribulations of being a middle-aged mum, and bring me out the other side sad that it’s over because I’ll have to return to my seemingly never-ending unreading-reading state.